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This reinforces my policy of buying laptops with the cheapest drive offered and replacing the drive with an SSD before the first boot. I run Linux anyway, so booting Windows has no value for me.
... and replace the CPU with one that is known not to have backdoors. You'll have to craft it from Silicon yourself, though, because there aren't any available for sale anymore.
I'm surprised that this is just now news. I received complaints from people participating in our beta trial ( http://sketchtogether.com ) from as early as October 22nd, 2014 that our website was broken, and it was because of Superfish being installed on their lenovo laptops. When they uninstalled Superfish, our webpage started working again. Superfish injected a line of code that referenced "sf_main.jsp" from a remot…
How much you want to bet that thing is XSSable?
Interesting....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would have to re-write/re-flash the firmware as well.
What is it that the firmware can achieve? Is the firmware capable hijacking data, communicating with the NIC and transmitting data? Or is it somehow injecting harmful code? I feel like I'm missing something here.
For example, it could binary-patch (either at write time or read time) your kernel image on disk to communicate with the NIC, etc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would have to re-write/re-flash the firmware as well.
What is it that the firmware can achieve? Is the firmware capable hijacking data, communicating with the NIC and transmitting data? Or is it somehow injecting harmful code? I feel like I'm missing something here.
This is much worse than just installing adware. They install a web proxy which MITMs all web connections, including HTTPS by means of a pre-installed trusted root certificate. The root certificate is the same across all installs, and the private key is present on the machine (necessarily, to operate the proxy): https://twitter.com/fugueish/status/568258997578371072 Someone will extract the private key in the next few…
The certificate technique they use dates back to at least 2010 (possibly only in add-on form back then?) See https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.support.fi... for example. This causes other problems too: http://www.id.ee/index.php?id=37046 It's not alone in this behavior: http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/display/istcontrib/Programs+tha...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would have to re-write/re-flash the firmware as well.
What is it that the firmware can achieve? Is the firmware capable hijacking data, communicating with the NIC and transmitting data? Or is it somehow injecting harmful code? I feel like I'm missing something here.
EDIT: According to another comment here, HTTPS connections in Firefox aren't affected because they don't use the system certificate store. But what about Chrome - do users see an error on pages with pinned keys, or is the proxy smart enough not to attack those connections? Or does it also disable Chrome security features like HSTS and key pinning?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The certificate technique they use dates back to at least 2010 (possibly only in add-on form back then?) See https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.support.fi... for example. This causes other problems too: http://www.id.ee/index.php?id=37046 It's not alone in this behavior: http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/display/istcontrib/Programs+tha...
What's funny is that they have three apps for photo-based matching of products...and pets. They really are a "visual search" company, a CA start-up of 80-200 people according to LinkedIn... They just seem to have forgotten the "don't be evil" parts of their business model...
That or maybe they are completely clueless about the security implications.